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[I’m not a sports analyst, and this is not a sports blog. We’re scholars, especially of political communication, politics, and media policy. But I do crunch numbers, and I thought I could help add something to this debate.]

We’ve all spent the last week hearing a lot about Tom Brady’s balls. Patriots fans and Pats haters are fighting online with a viciousness that’s hard to overstate. A good number of you have also seen the use of statistics to try to sort out whether the Pats have a measurable advantage in something that would be directly related to the inflated pressure of footballs — namely, fumble rates. Statistical analysis is only good, however, if the data are correct, if we are testing what we think we are testing, and if we are using the right statistical tools for the job. In this case as in so many, we need more good analysis that asks the right questions and uses the correct data.

(…On the bright side, I suppose I’ll be more productive next year when there’s nothing interesting to watch on television.)

As a media consumer, I was shocked. Everyone who watches Community knew the show was in ratings trouble. But the other two shows have been a Thursday night tentpole and didn’t seem to be in danger. Considering the hit-or-miss quality of most NBC programming, does anyone believe that they’ll find three replacements that are better?

As a media analyst, this strikes me as evidence that NBC just doesn’t understand (or accept) how the tv game has fundamentally changed. The network has the attention of a valuable niche audience, but insists upon wasting it. NBC was once the most popular television network in America. But that was during the era of broadcast television, when limited consumer choice meant that three or four networks enjoyed the luxury of competing over an entire national audience. NBC was home to The Cosby Show and Cheers in the 1980s, Friends and Seinfeld in the 1990s. Those hit shows brought in a whole national audience. Today’s NBC shows attract an appealing niche audience rather than the whole nation.

The difference is cable tv and the Internet. Cable television existed in the 1980s and 1990s, but had a different texture. Cable stations offered niche programming, while the networks offered staples. Many households did not have cable back then. While HBO started developing its own programming relatively early, we were still a long away from AMC competing for “best drama” Emmys with Mad Men. Lacking the social web, audiences were passive. Lacking the rich online data environment, advertisers settled for coarse metrics of audience interest.

Today, NBC fills a pretty sweet niche with its programming. Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, The Office*, and Community anchor a lineup of generally pretty-smart comedies. They attract devoted fans who riff on the shows constantly online. My students at Rutgers frequently mention that they watch 30 Rock or Community. They never mention Two and a Half Men. My friends and colleagues are the same. Amongst the social clusters who watch Mad Men and The Wire, NBC is the broadcast network that we most often tune in to. NBC could choose to be happy with that audience. It’s a tech-savvy crowd, with enough spending power and cultural capital to keep advertisers happy. But that would mean relinquishing the dream of recapturing 1980s audience-share. Apparently the network decided to go another direction.

If some upstart competitor is smart, they’ll view this as an opportunity. Cult favorite Arrested Development is already heading to Netflix. Netflix or another outlet (Current TV 2.0, anyone?) ought to round up these shows and corner the market on creative-class cultural favorites.

Arrested Development is a great example of the broader trend: how can a show that is so intensely popular not be worth airing? In the era of broadcast, when there were limited timeslots, I can understand that logic. You cancel it because the “real estate” of prime time television is too scarce and too valuable. But can anyone honestly argue that Arrested Development wouldn’t attract a solid niche audience on a weekly basis? Now that we have hundreds of channels, plus hulu, plus netflix, plus youtube for remixes, plus tumblr for memes, plus twitter for riffs, no channel is going to attract Seinfeld-sized audiences. But that also means there’s expanded opportunity for quality programming.

If you can’t make money off of Arrested Development or 3o Rock, Parks and Rec or Community, it’s time to get out of the money-making business.

*The Office is sticking around for another full season. I will pay cold, hard cash if someone can explain the logic of that move.

Today’s comic from xkcd is titled “Ablogalypse.” Randall Munroe shares his work under a Creative Commons License, so I’m reposting it below*:

Three things about this chart:

1. Notice that mentions of “blog” haven’t declined much. People are still blogging. People are still talking about blogging. But people are also finding new uses for tumblr sites, and many of those uses are absurdlyshareable.

2. We saw a similar process a few years ago with social network sites. Several public commenters looked at the rise of facebook and suggested it meant a decline of blogging. Chris Bowers (I think, can’t find the post) responded that instead we were seeing finer-grained niches. Blogs used to be the only self-publishing game in town (’01-’04ish). So early adopters used blogs for all sorts of communicative purposes… even ones which a medium designed for instantaneous default-public, default-permanent writing is poorly-suited. As the social web has developed, new platforms have been created with different affordances. The more sophisticated users have started to select the right tool for their communications purpose.

3. Tumblr sites are particularly good for fun viral stuff. Last week’s phenomenon, Texts From Hillary Clinton, is a great example. Two netroots politic0-types came up with the lolcats-style idea over beers. A few years ago, they would’ve launched it as a blog. That would’ve worked alright, but blogs are a little clunky if you just want to post images and short commentary. So today they use a tumblr site instead. To the extent that images-and-captions are more viral-friendly (or “upworthy“) than their text-heavy equivalent, we ought to expect a spike in tumblr’s google rankings.

Last Friday at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, I gave a presentation of my latest paper, Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time. It’s essentially an extended rumination on the phenomenon associated with this graph. New features of the social web emerge fast. It creates a novel research problem — our most robust social science methods are based in the ceteris paribus assumption that the communications network we sample at time X will be basically the same as the network in existence at time Y**. I argue that, in the face of the ongoing adoption and adaptation practices, our best research options often involve embracing the messiness, being transparent about our data limitations, and hacking together kludgy research designs that provide some analytic leverage on how the system is evolving, and how it all fits together. …In light of this week’s comic, maybe I should have added “keep a sense of humor” to that list.

*Please tell me you’re already regularly visiting XKCD. New comics come out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There is no such thing as a person who would enjoy shoutingloudly.com but dislike xkcd.

*Where X = the time when you conduct the research and Y = the time when your research is published. It’s a reasonable assumption most of the time, and hellishly problematic when it proves unreasonable.

Via Facebook today, I had yet another cause to discuss how I use (and why I love) my Kindle. This isn’t a Gizmodo-style tech lust blog by a long shot, but other folks—especially other academics—often want to know if this device can improve their lives. The short answer is: Maybe. For me, Continue reading →

[This is more of a holiday-cheer post than my usual academic blog entries. ‘Tis the season…]

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins’s excellent work on the various effects of digital media on media production/culture, “convergence” takes on multiple meanings. Part of what makes it such a good book is that all of these meanings are true. Media convergence includes both the rise of mass media conglomerates and the rise of read/write culture. It is the interaction of those forces that determines the shape of media power in the 21st century — we can’t just focus on one or the other.

That said, there’s also the normative question of “is it a good thing or a bad thing?” Social scientists are trained to duck this question, but we all have our opinions. And particularly for those of us who deal with YouTube and other “user-generated content,” it’s easy to get swallowed up by the junk and the horrendous comment threads and bemoan the lack of quality that comes as we move from a filter-then-publish world to a publish-then-filter one.

You’ve almost certainly seen it. It’s been viewed over 33 million times, making it the third most-visited YouTube clip of 2009. Cute couple. Wedding in a chapel. Chris Brown’s “Forever” starts playing. The groomsmen and bridesmaids start dancing down the aisle, followed by the rest of the wedding party and ending with the bride and groom. It’s engendered numerous spoofs, and was directly referenced in The Office’s wedding episode. It’s hard not to smile, watching this outpouring of joy and affection. These people were having fun.

I can’t help but compare the JK Wedding Dance to “The Real Wedding Crashers.” This was a short-lived reality show on NBC in 2007. It’s pretty much the perfect antithesis to the wedding dance. Launched after the Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson pic, “Wedding Crashers,” the premise of the show was that soon-to-be-married couples would secretly sign up to have their nuptial events ruined by the “crashers.” Hidden cameras would capture the crowd’s disgusted reactions, and we the people could watch and entertainment. After months of constant/heavy promotion, the show lasted 4 episodes before joining the rotting husks of so many of its fellow bad-idea reality shows.

“Real Wedding Crashers” always left a bad taste in my mouth. You can just imagine the pitch meeting: “it’s just like the movie hit, but with real people! Imagine a cross between Survivor and Wedding Crashers… It’ll cost nothing to promote and be a cross-platform event!” This is 15-minutes-of-fame at its worst, taking one of the most storied moments in a relationship and turning it into a mean prank on friends and family. It’s crass, it’s mean, and it appeals to the worst in each of us. Oh, and it’s over-promoted on primetime television, probably replacing a cult favorite broadcast television show that had high production costs and a niche, devoted fan base. It’s hard to think about “reality” shows like this (which are, in actuality, the antithesis of “real”) and not wish a speedy collapse upon the media conglomerates who visit them upon us.

And then there’s the JK Wedding Dance. Semi-spontaneous, joyful, fun, making a special event more special and more memorable for the community that’s present. Zero production costs, zero promotion, and reaching a viral audience of 33 million.

I don’t want to make too much of the juxtaposition — just share it because it so often occurs to me. These are only two cases, interesting because of their symmetry. But when I consider the normative question of whether the paired rise of participatory media and destruction of revenue streams that supported cherished older media, I cannot help but reflect on this pair of examples. Most of YouTube is a combination of junk user-generated content and clippings from the mainstream media. There are very few gems like this one, and bountiful examples of the fundamental flaws in the human character, I’m sure. But the same is true for network television. Given the choice, I find YouTube and other social media far less depressing than the economic logic of mainstream media convergence. Democratizing production allows for more beautiful ideas to see the light of day. As a researcher, I’m not sure how to count, prove, or disprove any of that. But as a citizen, it sure does bring a smile to my face.

It is with a joyous heart that I welcome our latest co-conspirator contributor, Paul Falzone.

Like the rest of us, he has a big “Penn” stamp on his arse, having earned his PhD from Annenberg in 2008. He started in 2003 (same year as Jason and me), and it quickly became apparent that he was a genuine radical. Little wonder we got along so well!

Paul’s now at Green Mountain College, as good a home for him as I could have possibly imagined.

I look forward to seeing his insights appear with the same unreliability that our 3.5 readers have come to expect from the rest of us.

The MTA is so zealous in their enforcement of trademark and copyright that, at least according to one blogger, they’ve already censored me.

That was news to me, but it wouldn’t have surprised anybody if it were true. Here’s what is:

On July 25, I uploaded this design to CafePress:

CafePress took down the design within 30 minutes (and over a weekend)–presumably before the MTA could contact them.

When I emailed CafePress, they helpfully provided me the name and contact info of the MTA lawyer with whom I could take up the matter. The fact that this info is available to the CafePress help desk is scary–it suggests that the MTA attorney is very regularly contacting them.

Then yesterday, I saw the following tweet from NYCPhotoRights: “New post: MTA Censors Another Parody (http://cli.gs/1X0XX)” That user had also just started following me, but Tina and I were busy getting ready for our Labor Day Weekend BBQ and I didn’t follow the link.

The link is to this NYC Photo Rights blog entry, which shows a picture of my design under the same headline. I may be misreading the post, but it appears the blogger thought the MTA played a direct role. I posted a comment there correcting the mistake.

For the record, I have not as of yet been contacted by the MTA. I hope (though I have absolutely no faith) that they will not contact me simply for posting my design as part of a discussion about their preposterous over-enforcement of their trademark rights.